Since Stuart landed the Qt port into mozilla-central the other day and Ryan Paul wrote an article on Qt and Mozilla I thought it might be worth it to add some context to that work.
Ryan’s article contains this quote from Nokia developer Oleg Romaxa:
“Nokia will use the best browser for the job,” he said. “Currently, we cannot make a full-featured and integrated browser with WebKit in mobile. But with Mozilla, we do not need to do anything, we can take existing models and API’s which are available. Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine. They are also concerned that WebKit is, to some extent, controlled by Apple, who are in competition to Nokia with their iPhone.”
There are a few important things to note here. First, that Mozilla is the complete package. We’ve got everything that you need to implement a browser. Disk cache, integrated (and well tested!) networking, a super-fast JS implementation, an XML UI markup language (XUL) and a brand that regular humans recognize. Those things mean you can get to market faster as a mobile integrator or developer instead of having to create them yourselves again.
Second, our neutral stance. We believe in the web over any particular platform. From Nokia’s standpoint if you’re building on the same technology that one of your major competitors is leading vs. working with someone who absolutely wants a web browser to succeed across all of Nokia’s platforms – which partner would you choose? I’ve often said “pick your partners carefully” and this has to be an important part of any technology decision making process.
There’s also another interesting flip side to this: who is WebKit’s other major competitor? Apple itself. Just like Microsoft’s push to get Silverlight out in the world, Apple wants people to write apps to their native platform. In this case, the iPhone. Given the strategic value of the native platform as part of Apple’s offerings, their investment in WebKit will (or at least should) always lag behind. We’re investing everything we have in the web and our platform and it’s starting to pay dividends.
And since I have your attention here are two other very interesting checkins: GTK+ and directfb (which people are actually building products on) and worker threads (ala Gears.)
Look at our current (and planned) platform support: win32, windows mobile, win32 + qt, mac OSX, linux + gtk2, linux + qt, qt embedded, linux + gtk2-directfb, x86, ppc, arm. We’re bringing the web to everyone and we’re doing it with a single coherent project with regular releases. That’s what I mean when I say “for everyone everwhere.” The web is bigger than any platform and we’re the embodiment of that mantra.
Mozilla is moving. It’s fast and furious now. And I think we’re just getting started.
[ Update: It was pointed out to me that what I wrote above might be misinterpreted as announcing that Nokia had picked a platform or something similar. Just to be clear that wasn't what I was doing, and as far as I know they haven't. I don't have knowledge about that decision inside of Nokia. Only they know. I was just pointing out what a decision making process might look like and the importance of picking well-aligned partners. And the fact that we're running on more and more platforms these days which is cool as hell. ]
Are there any plans to push for a WebKit/Gtk+ like GObject API integration?
From my point of view this is the last landmark that would make Gecko the perfect engine for a GNOME Developer.
I’m still wondering how long it’ll be until we see some QT/Firefox compiled for OSX and Win32 :)
Sounds pointless I know.. but could Qt actually become some kind of competitor to Firefox’s current gui abstraction mechanism in the long run?
So they have an entire team devoted to the webkit S60 port and they just bought a company that in heavily involved with the QtWebKit port. That sure sounds like they are going to choose Firefox if I ever saw it. More like hedging their bets.
We’ve been looking at the new embedding API and I’ve made a couple of posts to that effect. There’s a complete page in the wiki about it:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Embedding/NewApi
There’s work underway for Qt + win32 + GTK+ all at the same time. We’re making progress on that front.
The Qt support that Pelle has been working on is actually done largely on win32 and embedded, so we know that works.
As for hedging, this is probably what Nokia and just about every large company does. I just updated the post to make it clear that I was talking about our multiplatform support, not that Nokia had made a choice here. Sorry about any confusion about it.
This is a very important point. I wish there was a way to more easily convey this to those people who are considering Gecko vs. Webkit from the embedding side of the game.
Having Mozilla for a cross-platform application toolkit would be great. What we’d need, however is a way to call native libraries. Is this possible? Are there examples of such an approach?
While I think that FF3 is one of the best browsers available today, I also think it still sucks heavily in many areas (mainly UI speed and stability as visible problems, and probably “code that is difficult to learn and maintain” in the background). So my hope is rather that Webkit will become good enough to allow building a new browser (or several competing browsers) that has the really good usability of FF3 but is fast and stable and easy to maintain…
Honestly, FF is a nice application, but it doesn’t seem to offer usable “building blocks” to for making own applications. Webkit OTOH seems to become a reasonable small building block which does one single task and does it well.
Jos -
We call out to native libraries all the time. See XPCOM.
I think one thing you have dismissed, is that while Apple may have a lot of contributors, there are a lot of other folks involved who have commit and review control.
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team
You guys must be really scared of WebKit to launch into this fudparade
there is no such thing as a “neutral stance” when your income and growth is tied to mozilla ad-revenue. You need Mozilla to succeeed and others to fail or your very income will be peril.
Ice67 -
I think that your assertion assumes that we act like a normal business. We don’t. We’re an open source project and we happen to have a non-profit company as a mechanism to operate in the business world. We would still be doing the same thing that we are today even if there wasn’t any ad-related revenue. It’s just a mechanism for us.
And I don’t think we’re scared of WebKit. That’s not really the right way to think of how I think about WebKit anyway. In general, WK has been good for the web. A second rendering engine that helps chip away at Microsoft’s market share, even if it’s largely embodied in a proprietary browser, is good. But too many people feel like Gecko and WebKit are somehow the same. They are not. The models are different, they contain different sets of software, the projects operate at different scales and with different motivations. It’s important to point that out from time to time.
Alberto: check out GOM
Excellent to hear more about the browser scene in the mobile arena.
Also liked the ReCaptcha on the site :-) we all doing our bit translating stuff :-)
There’s just no comparison, subjectively or otherwise. Webkit is so far behihnd in too many areas to even matter. If the big boys want to fight it out let them but that has no bearing on a choice of engine to use. The smart developer will choose Moz hands down. Webkit aka baby KHTML is all Apple, and well whose going to trust them, especially on Windows. All their Windows rhetoric and now you want to use Webkit as a browser engine for Windows?!
Anyway, went to the WebKit page and there’s zero embedding documentation for developers, so what’s all the fuss about anyway? Where’s the beef?! So bascially we have Moz willing to OS their code with plenty of docs help and and then we have Apple$ and MS$, you decide.